Related
articles on the IMaGe website: Motor
Vehicle Transport and Global Climate Change: Policy Scenarios The Photographic
Record. SunSweep: A Visit on the Summer Solstice The Spatial
Shadow: Light and Dark--Whole and Part

By my calculations, on May 16, 2000, with the summer solstice
fast approaching, the sun should have been directly overhead at noon roughly
somewhere near where I stood in south Goa.
The linked photograph shows the author’s wife, Kami Pothukuchi, on the
beach
in Goa, approximately 74 degrees east longitude, 15 degrees north latitude.
Consider the pattern of shadow in that photograph. Prior to this
past May, I had never experienced the sun directly overhead, nor had I
traveled to India, my wife’s home country. Thus, during my stay in
India, I could not help but contemplate the sun and its byproducts and
how they affected life in India.

Appropriately, the sun and its effects played a central
role in our trip. Even before our departure from Ann Arbor, my wife
and I regularly checked the weather reports for Mumbai and Chennai in order
to gauge just how hot it might be there during our stay. We arrived
in Mumbai around midnight on May 7, but the heat and humidity still were
intense, especially with the monsoons only about one month off. From
then on, every day required consideration of the sun and the deleterious
effects it might have on my pale skin: dressing properly, finding shade,
applying sunscreen, obtaining safe drinking water, and timing trips to
avoid the worst heat of the day, if at all possible. (Linked
photo shows the author, looking weary of the sun, in Mumbai.
The street is not named for the author.)

Indirect products of the sun, too, were much in evidence
during this trip. Fossil-fuel powered vehicles
(note traffic in linked photo) are becoming increasingly common in India,
for example, and they have begun to cause severe pollution effects.
Even in the hill station resort of Ooty, surrounded by tea plantations,
diesel exhaust proved omnipresent. Like Mexico City, Ooty is nestled
in a mountain valley. Therefore, the exhaust produced by the countless
tour buses, motor scooters, and power boats that ply the narrow mountain
roads and mountain lakes settles in and stays the night, just like the
tourists. Indeed, by my nasal meter, air quality in Ooty was worse
than what we encountered in Mumbai.

Plastics, too, the polymerized end-products of eons of photosynthetic
activity, have found their way into the Indian environment. Everywhere
we went plastic bags and bottles littered the countryside. Apparently,
the Indian system of creative reuse and recycling of all waste products
has yet to devise a system for keeping up with the supply of discarded
plastic.

Let’s not forget about the rain. The monsoons, terrific
storms powered by the intense summer sun heating the land far in excess
of the sea, were due shortly after our scheduled departure for the U.S.
As luck would have it, however, our return to Mumbai from greeting the
sun in Goa was met with the worst pre-monsoon rains in 50 years—rains so
intense that they shut-down the trains and buses and even dislodged a seemingly
endless series of stories dedicated to gambling scandals in cricket and
the Miss Universe Pageant (an Indian won yet again—could the sun have played
a role here, too?) from the front page of The Times of India.

Today (summer solstice, June 21, 2000), the sun begins heading
south again, headed toward the Tropic of Capricorn for about the ten billionth
time. As it does so, it will pass over much of a nation that is increasingly
a leader in high technology, albeit while still having most of its one
billion people mired in deep poverty. Now that I am back in the US,
avoiding use of my car and recycling all of my plastic, I am hopeful that
India will devote some of its newfound high-tech expertise toward improved
use of our shared solar resources. Perhaps, for example, an Indian
engineer will develop a solar-powered car, or at least one that runs cleanly
off all those empty plastic water bottles that I left behind.